Thomas Massie And Joel Salatin Talk Farming And The Huge Beef Processing Bureaucracy

Here’s How America’s Farmers And Ranchers Will Get Slaughtered  Flooding the market while small ranchers remain trapped behind processing rules will accomplish exactly the opposite.

Out on Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia, cattle move across green pasture doing what cattle were made to do. They eat grass. No feedlot stretching to the horizon, no endless line of grain trucks, and no complicated industrial supply chain standing between the animal, the farmer, and the family that eventually puts that beef on the supper table.

Just grass, cattle, soil, sunshine, and a farmer trying to make the numbers work.

That made Polyface an interesting backdrop for a recent conversation between Salatin and Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie. Because while they stood talking about cattle, processing, and the future of American agriculture, Washington was once again trying to “fix” the beef market.

And the proposed cure may hurt the very people we’re supposedly trying to save.

The plan discussed by Massie and Salatin would bring hundreds of thousands of metric tons of additional foreign beef into the American market. According to their discussion, that beef could arrive substantially below prevailing domestic prices.

For shoppers staring at a grocery-store meat case, cheaper hamburger sounds pretty good. But drive twenty miles out of town and talk to the fellow feeding cows through February, repairing fence in freezing rain, paying the veterinarian, making the land payment, and trying to convince his son or daughter there’s still a future in cattle.

Suddenly, cheap beef doesn’t look quite so simple.

Ranchers Finally Saw Daylight — Then Washington Reached for the Switch

Salatin doesn’t mince words about what an influx of cheap imported beef could mean. He calls it a slap in the face to American cattle producers who endured years when margins were painfully thin, only to finally see cattle prices rise enough to make the work worthwhile again.

That’s important because a profitable year on a cattle farm isn’t merely money in somebody’s pocket. It tells a rancher that replacing that worn-out squeeze chute might make sense, that he can afford to rebuild fence, improve pasture, retain heifers, or lease another eighty acres.

More importantly, it tells the next generation there might actually be a living here. Take that signal away and something deeper disappears with it.

You don’t rebuild America’s cattle herd by making cattle less profitable to raise.

And you certainly don’t convince young people to spend their lives tending livestock if Washington can change the economics of their farm with the stroke of a pen.

You Can’t Have a Free Market With Washington’s Thumb on the Scale

This is where the argument gets bigger than beef. American agriculture has been living with government intervention for generations, and subsidies, tariffs, crop insurance, import restrictions, conservation payments, mandates, waivers, emergency programs, and bailouts have become tangled together like old barbed wire along a fence row.

Pull one strand and three others move.

Salatin and Massie point to soybean subsidies as a good example. If government payments make it more profitable—or simply less risky—to keep marginal acreage planted in subsidized crops, those payments can affect what farmers are willing to pay to rent land.

The cattleman feels that too. Pasture doesn’t exist in some separate universe, because corn, soybeans, cattle, hay, development, solar projects, and conservation programs can all compete for the same dirt.

So when Washington props up one use of that land, it can unintentionally make another use harder. That’s why calling every government market intervention “free trade” misses the point.

There’s nothing particularly free about Washington deciding which farmer gets protected, which commodity gets subsidized, which importer gets access, and which rancher gets to absorb the consequences. And temporary cheap beef doesn’t solve the underlying problem anyway.

It just makes the grocery receipt look a little better while the deeper cracks remain underneath.

The Processing Problem Nobody Sees at the Grocery Store

Meanwhile, Washington has also been talking about making it easier for American ranchers to process beef. Now we’re getting somewhere—at least potentially.

Because ask almost any small livestock producer what keeps him from selling more meat directly to families, and you’ll eventually hear the same complaint:

Processing.

A farmer can raise a steer from a wobbling calf to a 1,200-pound animal. He can feed it, water it, fence it, move it, doctor it, and care for it through blazing summers and January wind.

But once that animal becomes packaged meat intended for commercial sale, the regulatory world changes dramatically. For many small producers, that means getting access to an inspected processor, and in rural America, that processor may be a long haul away.

Worse yet, the appointment may have been booked months earlier. So the rancher loads the animal into a trailer, burns fuel hauling it down the highway, pays processing costs, waits for the meat, and eventually hauls boxes of frozen beef back home.

Only then can he begin selling steaks and hamburger to families who may live five miles from his pasture.

That’s one mighty long road from pasture to supper plate.

Be Careful When Washington Promises to “Cut Red Tape”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has talked about reducing processing barriers and using technology to improve food-safety tracking. On the surface, that sounds encouraging, but small farmers have learned to read the fine print.

That’s because “streamlining” regulations can mean very different things depending on who gets invited into the room when those regulations are written. If the biggest meatpacking companies have attorneys, lobbyists, consultants, compliance departments, and executives sitting at the table while the fellow running 75 cows back home is fixing a broken waterer, guess whose version of “streamlined” regulation is likely to get heard?

That’s the danger.

A regulation that’s merely annoying to a billion-dollar corporation can be fatal to a small processor. The big company hires another compliance officer; the little butcher closes his doors.

And every time that happens, another rural community becomes a little more dependent on the industrial food chain.

The Best Tracking System May Be a Farmer’s Name

Food safety matters. Nobody is arguing otherwise, but America’s obsession with technological traceability sometimes overlooks the simplest form of traceability mankind ever invented.

Knowing where your food came from.

Buy a quarter beef from the farmer down the road and the supply chain isn’t terribly complicated. You know the farm, you may know the pasture, and you might even know the animal.

If there’s a problem, you don’t need a sprawling international database to figure out where dinner originated. You call the farmer.

Industrial ground beef can be vastly more complicated because meat from numerous animals may be combined during large-scale processing and distribution. That’s one reason sophisticated tracking systems become so important inside enormous centralized food networks.

But decentralization creates traceability of its own. The shorter the chain, the fewer links there are to trace.

Sometimes the old-fashioned answer really is that simple.

The PRIME Act Takes a Different Approach

That’s where Massie’s PRIME Act enters the picture. Massie and Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree first introduced the idea years ago, and the basic principle is almost shockingly simple by Washington standards.

Give states more authority over intrastate meat processing and sales.

In other words, if the farmer, processor, and customer are operating within the same state, supporters argue that states should have greater freedom to establish workable rules without forcing every small transaction through the same federal framework built for interstate commerce and industrial-scale processing.

States and local governments could still establish safety standards. Inspectors could still inspect, and bad operators could still be shut down.

But the rules could better fit the scale of the operation.

That’s a very different philosophy from trying to make a two-room butcher shop operate like a massive packing plant processing thousands of animals. And for homesteaders, that’s the part of this debate worth watching closely.

A Law Matters More Than a Presidential Promise

There’s another lesson here that has nothing to do with cattle. Executive orders are temporary: one president signs them, another president changes them, and another administration interprets them differently.

Try building a twenty-year family business around that.

A farmer considering a small processing facility isn’t thinking about the next news cycle. He’s thinking about concrete, drains, refrigeration equipment, stainless-steel tables, insurance, employees, financing, inspections, and whether his children might someday take the business over.

That requires certainty. A banker wants certainty too, and so does an investor.

That’s why durable legislation matters more than another announcement from behind a podium.

A farmer can’t build a barn on a press release.

2020 Showed Us What Centralization Costs

We got a painful lesson in food-system fragility during 2020. Large meatpacking plants suffered serious disruptions, and suddenly Americans who had never given a thought to where hamburger came from were staring at half-empty meat cases.

Farmers saw the other side of the disaster. Some had animals ready for market but nowhere to send them.

That’s the weakness of extreme centralization.

When enormous amounts of production move through a small number of facilities, problems at one plant can ripple across several states. A cyberattack matters, a fire matters, a labor shortage matters, and a disease outbreak matters.

One broken link can shake the whole chain.

Now imagine something different. Instead of depending so heavily on a relatively small number of enormous facilities, imagine thousands of small and midsized processors scattered through cattle country.

One goes down? The county has a problem.

But the country doesn’t.

That’s resilience, and homesteaders understand it instinctively. It’s the same reason we store food, plant several crops, keep spare parts, save seed, and maintain more than one way to heat the house.

You don’t build resilience by creating one gigantic system that works beautifully until the day it doesn’t.

You build resilience by creating options.

Cheap Beef Today Can Become Expensive Beef Tomorrow

There’s another problem with trying to knock beef prices down through a temporary surge of imports. Cattle aren’t widgets, and you can’t tell a factory manager to turn the cattle machine up another 20 percent next Tuesday.

A cow has to be bred. A calf has to be born, and then that calf has to grow.

Heifers retained for breeding take even longer before their calves enter the beef supply. That’s why cattle markets move in long cycles.

Years of drought, high input costs, low profitability, herd liquidation, and ranchers leaving the business can’t be reversed in ninety days. America needs more cattle, more producers, more pasture, more processing capacity, and more young families who believe they can make a living raising food.

Those things require long-term confidence.

Dumping cheaper beef into the market may temporarily suppress prices, but if it discourages domestic expansion, today’s bargain can help create tomorrow’s shortage.

That’s the part politicians rarely put on the podium.

Washington Keeps Treating Symptoms Instead of Fixing the Fence

There’s an old farm lesson hiding underneath this whole argument. If cattle keep getting out, you can spend all afternoon chasing cows down the road—or you can fix the fence.

Washington loves chasing cows.

Beef prices climb? Import cheaper beef. Farmers struggle? Write subsidy checks. Processing capacity disappears? Create another program.

Food safety becomes complicated? Add another tracking system.

Then everybody stands around wondering why the system keeps getting more expensive, more centralized, and more fragile. Maybe the better answer is to stop chasing symptoms and fix the fence.

Make it easier for small processors to operate. Make it easier for ranchers to sell locally, let states experiment with meat-inspection systems suited to small producers, and encourage competition instead of building rules only giant corporations can afford to follow.

And above all, stop treating the American farmer like a problem Washington needs to manage.

The Real Beef Security Plan Starts Close to Home

For the homesteader, rancher, and rural family, that’s the real lesson in this beef fight. Food security doesn’t begin with a cargo ship full of cheap hamburger.

It begins with land, cattle, farmers, local processors, butchers, freezers, and neighbors who know one another. It begins with enough freedom for those people to trade with each other without requiring an army of lawyers and bureaucrats to stand between the pasture and the dinner table.

That’s not anti-safety, and it isn’t anti-consumer. It’s recognizing that a strong food system grows from the ground up, not from Washington down.

Because when trouble comes—and sooner or later it always does—the most resilient food supply isn’t necessarily the biggest one.

It’s the one with thousands of roots.

It’s the rancher fifteen miles away, the butcher in the next county, the freezer in the basement, and the farmer whose name you know and whose pasture you’ve driven past a hundred times.

Washington can import beef. Washington can subsidize crops. Washington can issue executive orders and hold press conferences.

But it can’t manufacture that kind of resilience overnight.

That has to be grown at home.

Source: https://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/thomas-massie-and-joel-salatin-talk-farming-and-the-huge-beef-processing-bureaucracy/